


we always (we always, we always) have a story

by Waypaststrange (moonbeatblues)



Series: full of field and stars, you carried all of time [2]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Drug Use, Emetophobia, F/F, Overdosing, Trigger warnings:, death mention, i watched all of bojack horseman last week and it hurt me, oof, pretty existential, rachel’s a god no biggie, this kind of just. wrote itself down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 09:01:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13948233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonbeatblues/pseuds/Waypaststrange
Summary: in which max has seen the edge of the universe and scrambled in the opposite direction. in which she has dreamed in the language of a time traveler, and someone answers.





	we always (we always, we always) have a story

**Author's Note:**

> chapter title is from the song stars by nina simone— the piano right after the quoted line is godly

You feel the sand between your toes first.

Not nice, like sinking your feet into those pale, smooth Hawaii beaches.  
Rough, cold and irregular and slick with the Pacific. Arcadia sand.

The sound of the waves is a little off, a little chopped up. It looks okay when your eyes are working again, though. The sun’s red and cherried on the surface, sinking slow, and the clouds form just above it like a low, wooly wall.

Not that you trust your eyes, especially when they cross and focus on Rachel Amber.

Rachel Amber. Like syrup on Chloe’s tongue, thick and gold, sticking all her teeth together. Rachel Amber, like the antichrist of the Vortex Club. Stole their magic out from under their noses, breathed it all in, the little tear in the universe that was hers, now.  
And died.  
Rachel Amber, deep in the glow of deer eyes where no glow should be, a feather behind the ear, the spirit of the Bay. Rachel Amber, a doe in the road on your way in, saw the dark whirl of Blackwell sucking you in and pressed all the energy of generations of dumb kids, pouring Fireball into the soil in reverence to something they’d never understand, between your ribs.

Rachel Amber, a god at nineteen. Rachel Amber, and her scrawny oracle, toes pushing divots into the harsh Arcadia sand.

She smiles, because of fucking course she does, pushes at your cheekbones with her thumbs. “You look tired.”  
—

She apologizes profusely, almost angry in her penance, wrings her hands over yours— so really, wringing _your_ hands— _i’m sorry i’m so sorry i didn’t want i didn’t mean it i_

You know. You’d have done it too, forced the solar winds of the universe down anyone’s throat to save Chloe, because it’s really her it hinges on, why Rachel’s still mucking around down here.

You take her hands and press them to your face again, and she stops talking. It’s kind of like touching a lightbulb, feeling directly for where all the light, the heat comes from. You feel your arms shake like you could rewind all the way back, watch the trees melt back into the ground and the sun and moon backpedal frantically across the sky.  
_I’m like a prophet_ , you think. _I’m like your prophet._

“Where are we?” You say instead. You don’t remember what happened before this, or after, or whatever the fuck.  
You’ve never rewound far enough to see Rachel. It gave you the distinct feeling of trying to finish cutting a folded shape out of construction paper and instead cutting it in two, little dangling halves of snowflakes, to try.

Chloe asked you, once. Maybe that was it. Maybe she looked so broken that you tried anyway. You’re certain you’d rip yourself to shreds if she wanted.

“Under the Bay,” she hushes with her eyes gold, and you look up as though roots will push down from the sky.  
She laughs at that. Something, at least.

“Not _under_ under, just.”

“In the heart of it.” You say, looking at her mouth, thinking less now about the metaphysical specifics and more about the ethics of wanting to kiss God.

“Yeah. The heart,” she breathes. “Do you know how you got here?”

“Chloe tried to convince me to find you?” That’s something to talk about, huh.

“No, you already tried that.”  
Oh. Alright. But then—

“You went back pretty far, but you wouldn’t have gotten to me. I’m not really....in the timeline, anymore. There’s better ways, if,” she clears her throat. “If you really want to.”

She drops her palm to the plane just under your clavicle. Her eyes darken.  
“You died, actually.”

You wheeze against her hand. “ _Uh_.”

Rachel winces. Her knees bump yours gently as she shifts toward you, sitting up onto the balls of her feet. “It was a bad timeline.”

The hand still on your face finds your temple, and your retinas flare.  
-

_Oh, yeah._

_This was a bad timeline._

You really are losing track, can’t let yourself settle down. Rewinding is starting to feel like a road trip, and each place you stop is another roadside motel— set your bags down, wash the grime of the road out of your hair, stale cereal in the morning, and then you’re off again. When your bones are too weak, you return to previously made beds, bodies used to you slotting up in against them. Kate, usually.  
  
God, you love Kate. You love Kate so much that you don’t leave for years— you wade back in after the storm and catch her before she leaves for college. Sometimes you take a gap year, sometimes you go with her, sometimes you just wait for her to call. She takes a little while, but she kisses you like she’s waking up even as you’re settling down in hibernation. She writes her children’s books and gives Alice free rein of her apartment and she squeaks and stutters up against you in the dark and you want to stay so badly that you can’t breathe.

This is not one of those.  
This time you’re in the Vortex Club— no, not in, just at. You’re in the bathroom, and the tile is cold on your knees.

You did this once, watched Vic do lines off a hand mirror, kissed back when she pressed you against the door with her wrists shaking and her breath hot and sweet. You went upstairs— whose house was it, again?— and Vic whined when you batted her hands away from your belt loops, curled up into you like a cat, digging little crescents into your side with her nails. She drooled a little into your collarbone. You didn’t care.

This isn’t that time either.  
Your nose bleeds into your lap and you drag your face over the sink, grip the porcelain. Red blooms and dissipates, dragged down in thin lines when you turn the faucet. Something feels wrong inside of you, wry and sick, and _fuck_ your nose is bleeding a lot.  
The music distorts in your ears, like it’s suddenly tuned down a quarter-tone, and you heave up something dark and sour, retch with a raw throat for a solid minute. _Drugs_ , you think, and _definitely not Vic._  
Victoria, for all her sneering, never let you overdose on her watch. You didn’t know shit— you do now, unfortunately, enough to realize what’s going on— and she watched you like a cat in the Vortex Club timelines, sat through seasons and seasons of SAO (god, Vic hates SAO) to make sure you didn’t pass out.  
No, this was something else.

Can something be worse the second time around if you can’t remember the first? Your vision going fuzzy, you try to reach Rachel. You can feel the ghost of her fingers on your temple.

  
_Rachel._

  
You sink back onto—into? You can’t really tell— your knees.

  
_Dude, pull me out before I throw up again._

And she does.  
—

“That seemed unnecessary,” you huff. The sound of the waves skips— you look up, and Rachel’s frowning.

“Sorry.” Her thumb drags under your watering eye, and you steady. A tap from the lightbulb. “Just— you can’t do that anymore.”

“Guess I’ll have to cancel my weekend plans.”

“ _Really_.” Her voice softens. “I don’t know if I can bring you back again. I can only reach out through you, and we’re lucky you were losing consciousness slowly enough for me to rewind.”

She clears her throat— you’ve never seen pictures of Rachel where she wasn’t happy. The crease between her eyebrows makes you want to smooth it out with both hands, because it just seems _wrong_ , intrinsically, that something should bother Rachel.  
The continuous scratch low in Chloe’s voice is making more and more sense.  
“I don’t want to lose you.”

Oh. Well, gosh.

“I don’t know what happens if you die, like, really die. No one else has the rewind, and god (your mouth quirks at the corner, almost involuntary) knows how long it could be before the Vortex Club figures out how to summon it again. If they can even still do it, anyway.”  
She looks up at you through lowered eyebrows, like a dog.

“And uh.” She digs her hands so they’re flat under her ankles, palms up. “I like you, Max.”

 

“You don’t know me.” Your eyes are screwed shut for some reason. Something about this is too much.

Rachel puffs out a half-laugh. The ends of her hair pool in her lap when she lowers her head. “I know you better than anyone, Max.”

  
“Y-yeah?” You’re not used to being caught off guard, anymore. “What do you know?”

“You’ve seen Final Fantasy: Spirits Within 47 times. You bruised your tailbone the first day you tried to snowboard because you wouldn’t touch down with your gloves if you thought you were going to fall. Your favorite vine is the one where packie vapes through his turtleneck.”

“It’s just such a power move,” you whisper, veins buzzing.

“You really like when Chloe smokes the clove cigarettes I gave her. Your favorite Vampire Weekend song is Obvious Bicycle and you turn up the volume really loud when it’s on because you like the sound of the pogo stick. You tap threatening messages out in morse code on the bus and wait for someone to look over in panic. It’s never worked.”

This should be illegal. A lot more people would be religious, you think, if God told them everything She noticed about them in a voice this warm.

“You order the shamrock shake every year even though you’re lactose intolerant. Your favorite color is red but you always say it’s blue. You cry when you rewind back to the bathroom.”  
She leans in so her hair starts to pool on your knees instead. “You’re scared to stay in one timeline too long in case you forget to go back.”

You’re crying now. Stupid, pretty, divine Rachel.

“I know you, Max.” She tilts your face up with one finger.  
“And I’m scared, too.”

  
Rachel doesn’t taste like vanilla or cinnamon or anything. Mouths taste like mouths, occasionally with toothpaste.  
But she’s _warm_ , warm down to your toes and she’s all hunched forward to kiss you with her knees resting on top of yours, tipped forward on her feet, thumbing at your ribs, and she sighs like she’s touching down after weeks of drifting along.  
You drink her in— she’s like wildflower honey, the sun in stripes through blinds, like the first few seconds of being in a hot car.

  
She breaks to hoist you by the backs of your thighs into her lap. You bump your forehead against hers softly, return the sigh she sent curling into your lungs.  
“What do I do?”

“I don’t know.” Neither of you are above a whisper— there’s a weird reverence here, like when the forest goes quiet all of a sudden.  
“Keep traveling, I guess.”

“When do I stop?” More tears. A desperate edge to your voice, like when you’d think about the yawn of infinity in the shower and squeeze your eyes closed.

“When you can’t go anymore.” The feather earring dips when she shakes.

“Can I come see you again?”

Rachel smiles all waterlogged and sad-happy, right up against your mouth. “Yeah.”

“Maybe—“ she says, shaking still. You reach out to smooth the crease still between her eyebrows. “Maybe you can stay, when you’re too tired to go.”

There’s hope in it, fear and sorrow and hope in a dizzying mess.

When you land again Chloe will tease you for getting teary-eyed over losing to her in Mariokart. She’ll go quiet when you don’t look at her, clamber over the couch pillows and controller cables and slide her hands around your jaw so your ears balance on her fingers and ask you if you’re okay. You’ll kiss her until she smiles around your tongue and believes you.

 

  
“That would be nice.”

**Author's Note:**

> it’s 2 am and this is turning into an accidental pitch for bojack horseman as i keep listening to nina simone
> 
> anyway. i’m @seafleece on tumblr and my writing’s up on @quetzalcoatlmundi


End file.
